The present invention relates to a paper money handling apparatus, and more particularly to management of securities such as bills, including validation of true securities against false ones and protection from illicit use by applying IC chips. It relates to, for instance, a managing method and system for bills in which wireless IC chips are embedded to be handled by automatic teller machines (ATMs).
It is proposed to embed IC chips in bills, gift certificates and securities such as share certificates, so that stolen securities can be prevented from subsequent illicit use or effectively managing the reuse of securities, if recovered, by their legitimate managers by managing information, unique to each such security, stored in the IC chips.
For instance, Patent Reference 1 (Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2001-260580) discloses securities in which non-contact wireless IC chips (e.g. RFID) are embedded and information in the IC chips is made rewritable together with a method and a system of preventing illicit use of such securities.
Patent Reference 2 (Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2003-178185) discloses a securities processing system which registers in advance in a database (DB) ID information (and securities information) regarding securities in which IC chips storing ID information are embedded and determines validity or invalidity of securities at the time of issue by referencing this ID information registered in the DB.
Patent Reference 3 (Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2004-164156) discloses a cash processing machine enabled to discriminate individual bills even if some of them are sticking to each other by providing each sheet with a built-in wireless IC and equipping the bill discriminator arranged on the bill conveying path with an antenna communicating with the wireless ICs.
No such bill provided with an IC chip as the ones disclosed in the references cited above is in circulation as yet. Any ATM in current use discerns the trueness or falseness of paper money by detecting the dimensions and optical or magnetic characteristics of each sheet, and the management of bills seems to be relying on information on the results of such true/false tests and reference numbers of bills.
To focus on the serial numbers of Bank of Japan notes, for instance, such a number is printed only on the front face of each bill, and its position differs from one denomination to another. Since bills are usually folded and kept in their bearer's wallet, they are likely to be creased. In order for an ATM to optically read surface information on a creased bill, it is necessary to smoothen the bill and perform sophisticated convey control involving accurate keeping of the bill's positional relationship with an optical sensor reading it.
Moreover, as the background of the serial number includes a clearly printed portrait and pattern, reading the serial number of alphabetic letters and numerals isolated from the rest of the read image of the bill requires a color sensor of a high reading resolution, sophisticated image processing techniques and character reading techniques.
Incidentally, more than 10 billion Bank of Japan notes are in circulation, and the effective life of each note is estimated at one to two years. Moreover, since the serial number consists of only nine letters and numerals, the same serial number is shared by more than one bill, and therefore the number is printed in different colors for further discrimination. On account of this circumstance, it is very difficult to read the serial number and to discriminate and manage bills by the serial number, and accordingly this technology does not seem to be available for practical use as yet.
In the management of bills by an ATM for instance, it is attempted to assign a virtual serial number to each transaction of a customer, assign another sequence of virtual serial numbers to bills in the order of conveying them from the cash slot to the conveying path, store the denominations and true/false test results of bills obtained from the bill discriminator into a memory with these virtual serial numbers as keys, and store good bills into a temporary stocker or reject false or otherwise unacceptable bills back to the cash slot.
However, these serial numbers assigned to bills are virtual numbers only for temporary use while the bills are conveyed within the ATM, and the bank attendant cannot visually recognize such serial numbers of bills having passed the ATM in his or her charge. Moreover, if bills become jammed during their conveyance and the attendant extracts the jammed bills, this will constitute a factor of uncertainty, which ruins the precondition of assigning the virtual serial numbers. For this reason, it is difficult to uniquely identify each individual bank note in the ATM.